LogFAQs > #902453848

Money doesn't get you happiness. It, however, gets you the physiological and safety needs portion of the Maslow's pyramid, while also enabling you to get catalysts and accessories for the other parts. So it might not directly get you happiness, but it gives you the foundation, as well as some of the tools to reach happiness easier.

There's one catch though. Humans are wired in a way that happiness and depression are generally relative to what you consider "normal" (that's part of Stockholm syndrome happens).

When you're rich, sooner or later, that becomes your "normal", and you're not any happier (or worse) than anyone else. Unfortunately, you now have MUCH more to lose and further down to go. If you lose everything you have, you'll be super unhappy. If you were poor to begin, that was your normal anyway. So richer people stress out a lot about keeping what they have (it's not easy!)

Eg: I was raised very poor. Not always sure I'll get to eat poor. Things changed, and while I'm no Bill Gates, I'm now fairly rich by most standards. If something happened and tomorrow I was to go back to my original life, I very well might contemplate suicide. I'm too used to my current lifestyle now. One screw up, some poor investment decision, something wrong going with my job, and I could lose it all. I have safety funds, but they're not infinite. That's stressful as hell. Stress I didn't used to have when I had nothing to lose. All I used to worry about was food -> housing -> insurance. That's it. Those were simple times.